6 Giant Blind Spots In Every Movie Alien's Invasion Strategy

Hollywood has fed us a steady stream of alien-invasion movies since the 1950s. At the moment we're trying to forget Skyline and waiting for Battle: Los Angeles, which is coming next month. But this is a good time to ask ourselves why exactly the alien invasions we see on the silver screen always seem to end in disaster for the invaders, despite their ridiculously advanced technology.

With that in mind, we have some words of advice for any alien civilizations thinking of vaporizing us and stealing our brains.

#6. Wear Something

So you're a wormhole-surfing, intergalactic warrior civilization with invisibility shields and lasers that evaporate people under their clothing? That doesn't mean you can just skip over the basic stuff. It's absurd to imagine a technologically advanced civilization that goes extinct because they all forgot to breathe, so why are alien invasions so consistently foiled by the invaders' neglect to so much as slip on a jumpsuit before they expose themselves to our toxic environment?

Hell, we don't leave home unprotected if it's a bad smog day.
Or if Gonzalez is boiling cabbage in the break room again.

Everyone makes fun of Signs because it depicts an alien invasion that is thwarted because the aliens die if they touch water. But that's not the issue. It's not their fault that water is like acid to them, but it is their fault that they showed up naked. You have intergalactic starships, but you don't have goddamned pants? How does a civilization's evolution just skip over that part?

It's like humans landing on a planet where 70 percent of the surface is covered in molten lava, and the inhabitants are basically just moving sacks of lava. Even the atmosphere is so dense with lava vapor that often lava just rains from the sky with little to no warning. So what's your plan of attack? If you say anything other than "Jump out of the spaceship completely naked, your junk proudly flopping about, and engage the lava monsters in hand-to-hand combat," then congratulations -- you are smarter than the aliens in Signs.

"Durrrrrr."

The invasion in War of the Worlds seems better thought out, initially. Their shields are impervious to bombs and bullets, and the human defense strategy is apparently to ignore this and keep shooting until the aliens fall down out of pity. So with the human race on its knees, what do the aliens do to celebrate? Run around naked, drink dirty puddle-water and put everything they can find in their mouths like a bunch of unsupervised toddlers. Days later, every single one of them is dead from the common cold.

The same fate almost befell E.T., who fell gravely ill after days of running around in his birthday suit and putting shit in his mouth.

This is not goddamned rocket science here. Inferior as we are, humans know that drinking water is a bad idea even if it's just in another country, and that's if we've had all our shots. How did any alien species even survive long enough to evolve without learning that you need to make sure shit isn't poison before putting it inside your body?

"Hey guys! There's a rancid old futon in here -- wanna lick it?"

In fact, before you even reach the stage where you're landing your flying saucer and looking through your closet for appropriate Earthwear, you really need to back the hell up and ...

#5. Do Your Research

In the War of the Worlds remake, the aliens bury their tripods at the sites of major cities before the cities exist, and humans learn that they have been planning their attack "for a million years." Let's ignore the fact that humans did not exist a million years ago and simply note that this is a really, really long time to plan an invasion. It's kind of a spectacular oversight not to notice that we have germs here.

It's like they never saw a picture of The Situation.

What were they doing for a million years? Why does it take so long to develop a strategy essentially no more complex than "shoot everyone, grind up their corpses for fertilizer"? Hell, after a million years of preparation, you should be more suited to walking around on Earth than humans are.

And it's not as if the aliens died from some obscure pathogen that just flew beneath their radar -- Morgan Freeman's disembodied voice very clearly specifies that the bugs that did them in can be found in every drop of water. We're not trying to suggest that the great H.G. Wells is guilty of some kind of lazy hack-work here; we realize that he was making a point. We're just saying that the point is idiotic.

Feel free to continue turning New Yorkers into dust, though.

Likewise, it's easy to suggest that the creatures from Signs just didn't realize that the planet they were attacking was predominantly composed of the one substance most toxic to them until they actually got here. But they have absolutely no excuse for that ignorance when you consider that humans, far less advanced than any race of intergalactic colonists, know that the planet GJ 1214 b might have water on it, and it's 40 light years away from us.

Maybe they developed a mind-crippling, species-wide addiction to crack before they invented the telescope but immediately after they invented interstellar travel.

These cosmic amateurs have a lot to learn from the alien race in Independence Day. In this film, we learn that the aliens have been studying Earth for quite some time, having sent ships here to examine our planet, abduct our people and turn our cows inside out for decades. And these savvy extraterrestrials didn't walk around in the nude, either. No, these guys fell victim to their very own series of strategic gaffes. For example ...

#4. Don't Attack America First

Every alien-invasion movie we've ever heard of takes place in the United States (and before you race to the comment section, District 9 is not an alien-invasion movie). With the upcoming Battle: Los Angeles, we expect this trend to continue, unless it has the most inaccurate movie title since Naked Lunch. But your invasion doesn't need to start with the USA, and you certainly don't need to blow up a series of famous buildings, allowing for the enraged and united people to then counterattack with full force.

Giant, skyscraper-size spaceships capable of vaporizing the White House are no defense to hubris. Or a MacBook.

Yes, we get why you might think it makes perfect sense to attack the powerful developed world first, just to get it out of the way, knowing that whoever's left won't put up much of a fight. That is, it makes sense if you are a Hollywood scriptwriter who has never had to plan a war. In reality, going straight for the United States is like trying to take down a mugger by punching him in the knife. No, the goal should be to disarm the enemy. Then your work is much easier.

In this case, that fierce military you're going up against is based on an extremely complex and fragile system that is extremely easy to disrupt. All of those jet fighters flying around in Independence Day? They require fuel. That fuel requires imported petroleum. Also imported are things like cobalt, manganese, chromium and platinum, without which we can't have jet engines, missiles or computers, or the means to repair them. That stuff comes from Africa.

Along with many other wonderful things.

So you just need to take out all of the largest oil refineries (and it takes only a few to completely choke off worldwide supply), some pipelines for good measure and a few fairly defenseless nations who dig up the raw materials that make the U.S. military go. Then you fly away and wait a few months (the U.S. has only a month's worth of emergency oil on hand at any given time).

Then you can come back at your leisure, at which point you'll find that the planes are grounded for lack of fuel and replacement parts and military personnel are either busy controlling riots in the streets because of the collapse of the economy or are off fighting one of countless raging wars over whatever remaining drops of oil are left in the supply lines. Hell, you may find that the Statue of Liberty has already been destroyed, taking one item right off your checklist.

Next target: The World's Largest Axe.

It's almost like the aliens want a gentlemanly toe-to-toe battle, as if they're fighting according to some regimented, civilized rules of warfare. Which might be why they fail to follow this next one.